The percentage of households falling below society's minimum standard of living has increased from 14% to 33% over the last 30 years, despite the size of the economy doubling. In Scotland today, when we compare people's actual living standards with the minimum standards which the public thinks everyone should have, we find that:

This paper provides an analysis of questions on attitudes to necessities for the child items and activities in the 2012 PSE Attitudes to Necessities survey. For the purposes of this research, adults were asked whether children’s items were necessities or otherwise – the findings therefore represent what adults think children need. The paper, first, presents the overall proportions of the population viewing items as necessities, and where possible compares this to the proportion of the population viewing these items and activities as necessities in previous surveys. Following this, variations between different sub-groups of the population are explored. Another working paper (forthcoming) will provide evidence of the number and characteristics of children lacking these necessities.

The results of the largest ever study into poverty and social exclusion show rising levels of deprivation and that parents sacrifice their own welfare to protect their children. Read the full press release for the 2014 Townsend Memorial conference held in London on June 19 and 20, 2014.

The latest edition of Poverty in Scotland, 2014, sets out to inform the independence debate in Scotland, providing the latest facts and figures and looking at how other regions and nations have tackled the problem. Gerry Mooney gives an overview.

Plans by the coalition government to change how child poverty is officially measured have had to be shelved due to deadlock in a row between the Treasury and the Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, according to a report in the Guardian newspaper.

Duncan Smith outlined the plans in a consultation document in November 2012. The document said that although income mattered, a new multi-dimensional approach was needed to tackle the problem of child poverty. It suggested criteria for measuring child poverty that included: living in a workless household; living in a family with problem debt; living in poor housing or a troubled area; living in an unstable family environment; attending a failing school; having parents without the skills they need to get on; or having parents who are in poor health. The coalition government subsequently produced polling evidence that it said showed popular support for the measures.

There is a need to recognise the role of social isolation in people’s experience of poverty, and to find ways of constructing a basic internationally comparable indicator for it, according to a new working paper by researchers at the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative.

The paper presents a working definition of social isolation; emphasises the relevance of isolation in poverty analysis; and proposes indicators to measure social connectedness that could be incorporated into a multi-topic household survey.

The importance of the weighting schemes used when compiling multi-dimensional poverty assessments has been highlighted in a research paper. The paper, written by a team in the Netherlands, points out that different weightings can result in different prescriptions for anti-poverty policies, where effectiveness is assessed by looking at the reduction in the numbers of those counted as being in poverty.

The paper uses data from the Survey on Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe to evaluate how alternative weighting structures affect the measurement of poverty for the population of over-50s in ten European countries. It considers the three dimensions of income and wealth, housing conditions and health condition (including mental health).

The way in which poverty is assessed needs to take into account inequality among those counted as multi-dimensionally poor, according to a new paper from researchers at the Oxford Poverty & Human Development Initiative.

The authors provide two illustrations, using Demographic Health Survey datasets, to demonstrate how an inequality measure adds important information to the 'adjusted headcount ratio' poverty measure.

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PSE:UK is a major collaboration between the University of Bristol, Heriot-Watt University, The Open University, Queen's University Belfast, University of Glasgow and the University of York working with the National Centre for Social Research and the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency. ESRC Grant RES-060-25-0052.